Debate Magazine
As a general principle, I'm all in favour of the "free schools" idea, vouchers for education and so on. It's all experimentation and some experiments will fail, but without experimentation, you'll never find out what works and what doesn't. A common objection or misgiving, which I share, is that the Islamists will hijack the scheme and set up taxpayer-funded madrassas. Well of course they will, these people have no shame and we now have an interesting live example of exactly this happening. The Statists of course use this as a Killer Argument Against the whole system, i.e. throwing the Christian baby out with the Islamist bathwater. Speaking in Parliament earlier, shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt said the Ofsted report was a "devastating blow to the education secretary's flagship policy". He said: "It reveals that pupils have been failed on every possible measure and parents will want to know why the education secretary has allowed this to happen." He described the government's free school programme as a "dangerous free-for-all". Surely it's not too difficult to simply refuse them a license or funding in the first place? I mean, we, the Great British taxpayers, will never all exactly agree on what constitutes a "school" and what doesn't, there are legitimate differences of opinion but only a small minority would consider that Islamist shit hole to be a "school" in any meaningful sense of the word. But really, my final point/question is this: there is clearly demand for places at such schools, but what sort of fuckwit parent wants to send their children to a school like this in the first place? Do they hate their children that much? It's absolutely beyond me.
